The Assistant Professor

Any human being is a virtuoso piece of biological architecture. And each develops a character, specific to him or her. It is the Lamarckian pressures that mold and twist the vagaries of one's behavior. This is a story about two of them. 

He was mostly dressed in grey pants and a white shirt. He had his spectacles in the shirt pocket for easy retrieval. And he carried about an air of knowledge and wisdom as most in his position are wont to project. His head mostly bent looking at the two feet of pace ahead of him as if in deep thought. I always wondered what he was thinking. He was after all a tenured professor in a university and that carried gravitas amongst the other lowly wretched souls trying to reach his lofty circles.  Over the three years I had known him, he had turned from what I entertained him to be a congenial sort into an irascible individual. He still carried the quirk of his smirk, that seemed to say, “I own you.” He came late to work exiting the elevator on the twelfth floor, looking directly at his secretary for any information that would ignite his slow burn into a full boil. At times he would be rewarded and other times nothing was passed between them and he paced his way into his 10 by 10 office and shut the door behind him, loud enough with that specific creak, that everyone in the adjoining room, knew he was in. The office itself was cluttered with papers and xeroxed articles from various medical journals, some half-opened, and others just collecting dust stacked in order of their time when received through the years. His desk was oddly half the size of the room with barely enough room to walk around it and on one wall on his right was a cryptic photo of someone much younger than him but kind of looked like him. No one had dared ask him about it, so no one knew the answer to the question that had piqued everyone’s curiosity.

His claim to fame was an isolated paper he had written several decades ago about an obscure pathological phenomenon that occurred in some malignant diseases of the white cells. His reputation had gained quite a few rungs on the ladder of fame in academic circles. And he seemed to deftly use that meteoric rise by giving lectures at various universities, propounding the importance of that esoteric finding. Soon, however, after his professorship was confirmed, the world moved on to other esoterica and he was left holding that dimly lit candle with almost no wick, in his hands. Periodically the past would provoke him, especially when new students showed up, where he would spend at least some time discussing the value of that arcane finding.  Few were impressed, others just nodded with politeness and still others showed little interest. His keen eye discerned those who would be his favorites for the duration of their time spent with him. I fell into the litter box to be filed away into obscurity. To those sucked in, into his vortex, he was a giant, and to prove his dominion over objects he would lean against door jams or hover over his desk with his head cocked and his fisted hand resting on a 5^th edition Hematology textbook.

His secretary however had his number and he would tiptoe around her without any sidewinding cryptic remarks. “Janet, would you please do such and such?” Everyone else was greeted with a smirk and a complex sentence filled with syllables to prove his intellect. Janet though was a no-nonsense person that took her duties seriously and had no room for frivolity or his bravado. The only other person who remained aloof from the professor’s gyre was his assistant professor whom he had hired recently. This one was a genius and was dedicated to the real science of medicine. The professor would often try to ride his coattails using his junior’s research as that emanating from “his” department. Try as he must, he could not rid the beast that burdened his shoulders and gave him his slight hunchback that could not be hidden within the one size too big lab coat. There was bitterness in him the kind that seeps through in short sentences and protracted but valueless dialogue. It erupted every time he met someone who could solve a quick riddle, answer a question without hesitation, or show the base level superior intellect that alluded him. Every encounter furthered his obsession to prove himself worthy of any intellectual company he encountered. But each time the fall back on his own sword bruised and gashed his ego and after a thousand such cuts, the shell of irascibility and petulance emerged as his defined character. 

My personal irritation began when after months of work, I completed a research paper on a particular malignancy. He wanted to see the paper before the galley proofs. I, of course, complied and showed him the paper. The next day he came in with a frown and eyes projected the inner turmoil and anger, indicating there had been some shorted fuses in his circuitry and the entire central processing unit of his brain was going to blow up when he started to speak. Composed himself, he did, with some mastery and a trembling hand on the edge of the desk. With veins popping on the dorsum of his hand from the angry flow of the adrenaline, he regained his composure. 

“You already submitted this paper?” 

“Yes, why, is there a problem?” 

“Indeed," his hand involuntarily flipped open the textbook with a vehemence quite accustomed by the wretched and frayed prop, "you are supposed to put my name in this paper as a second author!" He demanded.

“But you had nothing to do with it and did not work on it at all?” I protested. 

“I am the chief of the department and that is an automatic courtesy and a rule in this department.” Spit surfed the ether in my direction, and I backed up a bit to avoid the hit.

“What would you have me do?”

“Call the publisher and advise them of the omission.”

“Ok,” I said quietly and walked out of the room. Now my anger had the best of me. And that was the last time, I wrote a research paper. The fun juice had been sucked out of the entire process. I voluntarily recalled the paper from the publisher, citing errors, and never submitted it again. The battle of right and wrong had just turned red and the black print on the white manuscript gave me little solace or sense of accomplishment, anymore.

The year moved along at its petty pace. With icicles as arrows shot every so often and directed at me, the frigid air between us turned white with the unsaid words of anger, burnt to a crisp. I avoided dinner parties and kept to my own circle of friends. Those buddies kept trying to help bury the hatchet between us, but that station had passed many train whistles ago and so I bided my time to finish in that department. When the day came, I quietly, without fanfare, exited the department and the university.

He, the professor did not disappoint as a character always wins out. I remember receiving a copy of a letter that he wrote to the department head where I worked, in which he fomented his anger via words against me on my time spent in his department. Fortunately, that was countered with glowing respect, I received from the assistant professor. The latter was simple, direct, and complimentary and the former was filled with innuendos and stuff that vile is brewed from. No harm came of that. But the memory lives on and sculpts my behavior of how to be.

Luckily, my time at the university was not all in vain. The assistant professor saw some potential and asked if I wanted to spend time in his lab for a few weeks. I took that on and so began my love of all things “Basic Science.” This gentleperson was a wellspring of knowledge and a quintessential tinkerer in the domain of unresolved questions. He explored the microenvironment of the cellular function as his personal adventure; cataloging every surface and interior blemish under the focal vision of an electron-microscope. He also sketched in my mind the question of “why?” In business and fraud, they say, you must follow the money to get to the answer behind any problem that needs a solution. In this tiny lab the solution to any problem lay in questioning the obvious and the esoteric with the “why and how does it do that.” The quiet, soft-spoken, bowtie wearing, crisp blue shirt a day, assistant professor instilled in me the virtue of skepticism in all things called science. A virtue, to this date, I cherish. There are few people like the assistant professor, that one might place in their memory chest, genuine and true like Amadeus Mozart and there are many like the professor mean and vengeful that surround us in our daily lives, like Salieri, that one chooses to forget before the microsecond is history. 

My fervent wish for all students and physicians, young and old is that they learn to be skeptics. To question what Richard Feynman called conventional scientific cargo-cultism. For in that wisdom of skepticism, lie some of the greatest of insights and solutions to our most perplexing problems. I also hope and pray that all who seek to learn and enjoy science, have the benefit and the wealth of a man, like the one, I have called the assistant professor.